Reseller hosting

Start your own web hosting business
with a reseller account. Investment is small and potential profits are high.

There are actually two uses for reseller hosting accounts. Selling web hosting
services, and hosting multiple of your own domains under one account.

What this article is mostly about is the selling part. Reseller
hosting is a cheap way of starting your own web hosting company. You
purchase a reseller hosting account, set up some payment solution,
and sell web hosting packages. Your job, besides selling is to provide
support to your customers. The actual web host stays in the background,
running the servers, and provide support to you whenever you need it.
Your customers will never have any direct contact with the actual web host,
they don't even have to know that you are not running the servers.

Different reseller accounts

There are basically 2 types of reseller accounts. One (traditional) where you
purchase separate accounts at a discount, and resell them. With the other type
(bulk), you purchase a big web hosting account, where you can divide the disk
space and data transfer into smaller accounts. You can also specify the
accounts exactly like you want.

With the traditional type, you don't have to buy anything before it is sold,
but with a bulk account you have more options. The price of a typical
entry-level bulk account is around $30/month. This normally includes 1 gb disk
space and 20gb of data transfer. So you can sell 20 accounts with 50 mb disk
space, and 1 gb data transfer. With a price of $5/month per account, you can
see the potential profits.

Your own web hosting business

A reseller hosting plan can be the first step towards a lucrative business.
The market for web hosting is huge, just as the possible profits. But the
competition is extremely hard and advertising your web hosting business is
expensive. So it is easy to disappear in the crowd, and hard to get your
web hosting business of the ground.

If you already have access to customers (f.ex. if you are a web designer)
you can start by hosting your clients' websites. This can create a nice
income in addition to your design services. Getting those first customers
is also a major step for new hosting businesses, as word of mouth is
the cheapest and most effective marketing there is.

A web hosting business is not for all of us. Offering support to your
customers, setting up new accounts, monitoring servers etc. can easily
become a 24/7 job. Good planning and automation of tasks help, but
running a web hosting company is definitely not a nine to five job.

Name servers

One thing you should know about is name servers. Name servers are essential
for pointing a domain name to a web hosting account. You can normally use your
web host's name servers, but it looks unprofessional to have
ns1.acmehost.com and ns2.acmehost.com as nameservers, because your customers
will then know that you are reselling for acmehost.

There are 2 solutions to the problem. Anonymous name servers, which does not
contain any web host's name. One example is ns5.edns1.net. The other, and
best solution is your own nameservers. They will typically be
ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com, so they give no signs that you are
a reseller. You can also change web hosts without having to change name servers,
so a move to a new web host does not have to affect your customers. There is
sometimes a small cost associated with this, but it is a good investment.